1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to business continuity/disaster recovery planning and more specifically to reducing recovery time for business organization in case of disasters.
2. Related Art
Business organizations often require that operations (or at least the critical ones) of the organization be kept running in the event of disasters (natural or man-made) such as earthquakes, floods or major accidents/attacks, etc. In particular for business organizations involved in important public utility infrastructures like banking, power, telecommunication, health and financial industries, etc., such a requirement may be mandatory.
Disaster recovery systems are commonly used for providing continuity of operations of a business organization. A disaster recovery system typically includes a primary site containing systems that are used during the normal operations of the business organization as well as a backup site containing systems that are used during disaster situations. The backup site is generally located at a different geographical location from that of the primary site, to avoid the disaster from affecting both the sites.
When a disaster is declared (usually manually by an appropriate business authority) to have occurred associated with the primary site, the operations of the business organization are switched to the backup site to ensure continuity for the operations of the business organization. Such switching implies that the systems in the backup site may thereafter process user requests in the disaster duration, i.e., until the disaster is deemed to have ended or normal operation is restored at the primary site.
Recovery time refers to the time required for providing continuity of operations of the business organization in case of a disaster. In particular, recovery time refers to the duration between the time instants at which disaster associated with the primary site is declared and the first operation is handled by the backup site. A lower value for the recovery time ensures that the operations of the business organization are provided with maximum continuity/minimum break.
Different approaches have been used to lower the recovery time. In one approach, the systems at the backup site are kept in a shutdown/powered down state (as a “cold” site) to reduce the cost of maintenance of the backup site. As such, when a disaster occurs, the systems at the backup have to be manually powered up/started and the softwares initialized, which results in a large recovery time. In another approach, the backup site is maintained in a similar state to the primary site with all the required systems started and softwares initialized (as a “hot” site). Though such an approach results in lower recovery time, the cost of maintenance, in terms of money, labor, etc. of the backup site is considerably large.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to reduce the recovery time for disaster recovery systems, while overcoming some of the problems described above.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.